Posts Tagged ‘Nazi Germany’

A small band of hopeful explorers on Tuesday resumed the search for a Nazi train which was, supposedly, buried with a full cargo of stolen gold and weapons: local legend says as many as three Nazi trains were buried underground near the Polish city of Wałbrzych (Waldenburg) in Lower Silesia, south-western Poland, in January 1945, before the end of World War II.

Explorers Andreas Richter (German) and Piotr Koper (Pole), and several others, believe they’ll hit pay dirt in only a few days. A year ago, they used radar to receive a positive signal from one train beneath the city of Walbrzych. Then Polish Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Żuchowski announced that Koper’s and Richter’s radar images confirmed “with 99% probability” that a train 300 ft long is waiting to be plundered down there. But the local governor voiced his doubts about those prospects, and several teams that conducted similar surveys in the area came up empty-handed.

Nevertheless, last May, Koper and Richter secured a permit from Polish State Railways to dig for the gold train, and on Tuesday, one year to the day after their original announcement, they’re out there, digging three exploratory shafts from which they plan to start moving in on the buried treasure.

The World Jewish Congress last year issued a call on the Polish government that the train most likely holds valuables that were robbed from Jewish victims, and that once they are retrieved, a search must be conducted to locate the heirs of their owners.

Tadeusz Slowikowski, 86, is responsible for the Nazi gold train rumor. In 2015 he told the Daily Mail: “I became aware of the tunnel after saving a German man named Schulz from being attacked by two men. As gratitude for saving him, he told me about the tunnel.” That was in the 1950s, and Slowikowski has spent much of his time since searching for that train.

Local historian Pawel Rodziewicz told the AP that he had seen documentation showing without a doubt that the gold was transported to the German central bank in Berlin, and that the Nazis were not going to bury their stolen gold in Waldenburg, where the advancing Soviet Red Army could grab it. It made no sense for the Germans to invest in digging a secret railway tunnel, when for a lot less money they could ride that train home, he argued.

Of course, that’s exactly what someone who knows where the gold is buried would say to discourage competition…

The Gottlieb family had front row seats from their home in Germany during Kristallnacht and the rise of the Nazi Party. As Hitler Youth marched along their street, loudly and joyously chanting about a bloody demise of the Jews, it was clear they had to flee Germany. Dr. Fred Gottlieb tells Heather this week about his once idyllic, sheltered childhood, which suddenly became a quest to find refuge outside Germany.

Though it would be years until Dr. Gottlieb’s immediate family would finally be together again, each of them heroically upheld their religious observance and Torah-centered values.

(JNi.media) Carmen Bretin Lindemann, the daughter-in-law of Adolf Eichmann, who masterminded the Final Solution of Europe’s Jews, was forced to drop out of a mayoral race in Argentina last Thursday, after a Wednesday television interview in which she called Eichmann “grandpa,” and argued that “he wasn’t a bad person, he obeyed orders and did not personally kill anyone.”

Lindemann ran on the “A New Alternative” list, presidential candidate Sergio Massa’s party. However, shortly after her moment in the lime lights, the party expelled her. She published a statement saying: “In order to not hurt my fellow party members in the alliance my immediate resignation is necessary. I want to assure the public that I don’t and never did support the Nazis.” Which, as Newser commented, is a sensible statement that perhaps should be required of everyone running for office in Argentina.

In her interview, Lindemann also explained that “the history that you know is not the real one. The version that you know from movies and books is written by the Jews, and all the world accepts that history.”

SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was charged by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with managing the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. In 1960, he was captured in Argentina by Israel’s intelligence service, tried in Jerusalem by the Jews he hadn’t managed to murder, was found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1962.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu preceded his flight to Germany Wednesday for a meeting Chancellor Angela Merkel with by rejecting criticism of his remarks last night that linked Mufti al-Husseini with the Holocaust.

Opposition leader Yitzchak Herzog, his cohorts on Israel Radio’s Kol Yisrael (Reshet Bet) and the Palestinian Authority were all over the Prime Minister Wednesday morning, accusing him of re-writing history and inciting Arabs.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comments on the Mufti during his speech to the World Jewish Congress were perfectly timed, giving him ammunition to carry with him when talking with Merkel about Palestinian Authority incitement.

He rejected criticism that his comments implied that Hitler was not responsible for the slaughter of 6 million Jews, and he explained:

It is absurd. I had no intention to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry. Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews. He made the decision.

It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, Haj Amin al -Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler, Ribbentropp, Himmler and others, to exterminate European Jewry. There is much evidence about this, including the testimony of Eichmann’s deputy at the Nuremberg trials, not now, but after World War II. He said:

He replied to Arab criticism that he false accused the Mufti of advising Hitler to burn Jews and said:

There is much evidence about this, including the testimony of Eichmann’s deputy at the Nuremberg trials, not now, but after World War II. He said:

‘The Mufti was instrumental in the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The importance of his role must not be ignored. The Mufti repeatedly proposed to the authorities, primarily Hitler, Ribbentropp and Himmler, to exterminate the Jews of Europe. He considered it a suitable solution for the Palestinian question’.

Eichmann’s deputy, added:

‘The Mufti was one of the instigators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and was a partner and adviser to Eichmann and Hitler for carrying out this plan’.

He reminded listeners that “Haj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society. He appears in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding fathers of the nation, and this incitement that started then with him, inciting the murder of Jews – continues.

(JNi.media) While being questioned at Nuremberg, Göring was “humble” about having pulled off one of the most extensive theft of artwork in history with the comment, “everybody loots a little bit.” Now, a full list of the artworks confiscated by Hermann Göring, the highest ranking Nazi after Adolf Hitler, has been made available to the public. Every painting Göring ever stole for his private collection, as well as an exhaustive record of art he looted and sent elsewhere, will be displayed in a book due out in the spring.

The full catalog, which detailed the treasures, the original owners and where the works of art were sent, was kept in French archives, and for decades could be accessed only by scholars. For someone whose ultimate goal was to destroy a large chunk of humanity, Göring had a significant attraction to art, or at least, to confiscating collections belonging to Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime. Göring decorated his retreat near Berlin, the Carinhall, with looted treasures. At the end of the war, when the Allies were closing in, Göring had the artwork loaded up on trains and sent to Bavaria with a plan to move it onward to Austria, but the Allies intercepted the trains and sent the items to Munich.

The book project was undertaken by Nancy Yeide, head of curatorial records at the National Gallery of Washington. The book is expected to be a substantial resource for museums, researchers and those looking for art stolen from their families. In addition, the book serves as a testament to the staggering extent of Nazi theft. Yeide told the Independent, “Göring was essentially a black hole. No one has ever really looked closely at the collection and tried to reconstruct everything that was ever in it. That has been my goal.” Robert Edsel, an expert on looted artwork, told the Independent, “Nancy (Yeide) has been digging and digging. There are families looking for stolen art. It was a very timely book. When works surface—which they will do—this book will be an invaluable tool.”

Many of the 2,000 paintings created by artists such as Renoir, Botticelli and Monet, along with hundreds of sculptures and tapestries in Göring’s private collection, were stolen from Jewish families. French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, whose family of Jewish art dealers lost their collection to the Nazis, expressed satisfaction that the general public will finally have access to information of what art was stolen and from whom. Göring, like many high-profile Nazis, had extensive records kept of his activities, at least in part out of a bottomless need for self-aggrandizement. Now these detailed records have provided significant information to researchers. Göring’s original records showed entries handwritten by at least five different people detailing which paintings hung in which rooms on what walls at Carinhall. World War II historian Jean Marc Dreyfus told the Daily Telegraph, “This is the first time we have the complete catalog. My colleagues in other countries tried to reconstitute the list of works in this extraordinary collection, but there was uncertainty over 300 to 400 works because they didn’t have this catalog.”

In addition to thousands of items in Göring’s and Hitler’s private collections, the Nazi loot filled 26,000 railway cars in France alone. Last year, 1,400 works of art were found in a Munich apartment, including paintings by Chagall, Picasso, and Matisse. The apartment belonged to Cornelius Gurlitt, who helped Joseph Göbbels seize, store and sell art considered “degenerate” by Nazi censors. Gurlitt kept a large quantity for himself, including many works that belonged to the Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim.

Hitler and Göring were planning to create a Nazi museum after the war, to display the looted treasures. Hitler planned to feature Bruges Madonna by Michelangelo and two of Vermeer’s greatest paintings. When the Allies won the war, these paintings were recovered from an Austrian salt mine. The mainstream Nazi view was that modern art was degenerate, but a faction declared that modernism had Nordic roots and was permissible. However, Hitler insisted that modern art was depraved and in 1937 held an exhibition he named Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst— The Degenerate Art Exhibition, to show people just how bad it was. The exhibition featured the works of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Chagall, to name a few. Categories included “Destruction of the Last Vestiges of Racial Consciousness,” and “Complete Madness.” The exhibition was one of the most popular in German history and drew two million viewers to Munich. Göring purchased many of these pieces, even as Hitler was saying the works were decadent.

German authorities have charged a 91-year-old woman for her role in the murder of 260,000 Jews in the Auschwitz death camp during the Holocaust.

The woman, who has not been identified, served in the Nazi SS and worked as a radio operator for the camp’s commandant in 1944. Prosecutors plan to charge her as an accessory to murder because she aided the operation of the death camp.

The woman’s trial will come on the heels of the trial of Oskar Gröning, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” who was sentenced to four years in prison earlier this year for serving as an SS guard at Auschwitz.

Up until 2011, German authorities only prosecuted people who served in senior Nazi positions. But that year, John Demjanjuk, who had volunteered as an SS guard, was found guilty of accessory for the murder of more than 27,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp.

Since then, German authorities have been going after other people who could be charged as accessories to Nazi crimes. But among the 6,500 former SS members who served in Auschwitz and were still living at the time of prosecution, only 50 have been convicted, according to The Telegraph.